Bonsai
by Monica Judge
I saved every one of Matt’s emails, every text. Then, our daughter was born, followed closely by our son, and there were fewer love letters to tie with virtual ribbon. The ardent stuff—the endearments and romantic plans—dropped from most of our daily communications, replaced by something more transactional, a list of tasks that could be crossed off with a pen: Pick up the laundry. Swing by grocery store for stamps, fire logs and apples. Did you remember to pay gas and electric? Take out recycling? Please wake with the kids! Up too late. Stomach aching. Need to get some sleep.
A couple of years into parenthood, I sat on our couch sob-shouting at Matt, who stood awkwardly in the kitchen. “It’s like you’re not even in love with me anymore! Even your texts sound short.”
Before I fell in love with Matt, I fell in love with his planner. One Sunday evening, Matt sat next to me on his couch, opened his calendar and penned our dates into a box at the top of the page labeled, “Priority.” He culled them from an email he sent every week proposing new ways to spend time together: at the Skatalites concert, on a weekend trip to Saybrook, to a bull riding competition. We color coded our responses to each other:
Matt (in BLUE): Ethiopian or Vietnamese?
Me (in GREEN): Ethiopian, babe.
Matt (in BLUE): Babe. Booked!
My previous relationship had been with a man who never planned his life with me in it. His love was all poetic impulse with no stanzas or lines. We lay around for hours, strumming guitars, filling sketchbooks, bopping out to dinner, no reservations required. But, eventually, we mostly saw each other when I swung by his place. When he moved apartments, after years together, he didn’t invite me to live with him, didn’t consider renting one closer to mine.
When Matt added our dates to his planner, he scratched out a shorthand of his devotion to me—to us—that read: I’ll keep showing up. I want to be here with you. We are together. I began to trust him those Sunday evenings spent scheduling our lives together on his couch. My heart scooched closer to his.
Still, I worried. Love had never felt like the real deal unless I was in a state of ecstatic melancholy. Matt was available, so there was no longing. Matt didn’t hurt me, so nothing ached. I wondered: if Matt was all agenda, where was the poetry? I could love a man who lived inside the lines, I felt sure, as long as some of those lines were poetry.
The scene at our date to the bonsai exhibit was septuagenarians in juniper flat caps. Both the trees and their visitors stooped with arthritic burls. “The trick is to make them believe they’re full-sized,” Matt said, pointing to a ninety-year old miniature maple, pruned into a grand and stunted asymmetry. “That one is as old as Grampa.” It was funny that a tree—usually so imposing, so encompassing—could be made small enough to pat on its crown. How cute, I thought, as I contemplated the tiny, grown-up trees, looking as proud as children who had tied their own laces. (Years later, long after our wedding day, I would imagine that our older guests regarded Matt and I with the same condescension while, like cake topper versions of ourselves, we watered a weeping cherry tree and swore to water our relationship forever.)
The evening of our visit to the botanic garden, inspired by the bonsai, we improvised haiku in the twilight of Matt’s bedroom, planting the words like seeds:
Bonsai roots on rock
Two lovers’ limbs intertwine
One hundred years pass
It has been said that bonsai is the haiku of the tree world. When well-crafted, a whole season unfolds into seventeen syllables; every gradation of a mood, maybe even the sum of human experience, inhabits a space smaller than a square foot.
Matt and I planted a Japanese maple inside of a barrel and set it on the terrace of our first apartment together. The fall before we married—its purple leaves dropping onto the ground—Matt’s grandfather applied a steady pressure on him to pop the question in time for a winter wedding so he could attend it. He sensed he was dying even before his body showed the sure signs. The engagement ring we designed was underway at the jeweler’s, its sapphire eye on a summer ceremony the following year. We did not change our plans, and Grampa died five days after Matt proposed. On a July day, we married under two towering evergreens in his parents’ backyard, for better, for worse, and I got pregnant a few weeks later. Around the second anniversary of that visit to see the bonsai, I emerged from the nauseous fog of my first trimester and spread the news of a baby who would arrive in the spring.
After her marriage ended, author Deborah Levy wrote, “I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are.” God, and when I read that, I knew what she meant. By the time I was accusing Matt of not loving me, life had been relentlessly testing our capacity to stick it out for worse. There had been a life-threatening illness and two serious car accidents in the preceding months. My sprained back was a trap; I was stuck at home, depressed, with two tiny children, and winter was coming. Matt lost his job, and my father died, and the ache I associated with love—the punishing ache I thought I had made irrelevant by choosing Matt to marry—came rushing back into my body. It seemed there was absolutely nothing Matt could say or do to make anything better, but I expected him to come up with something. I was furious that, instead, he talked about planning, projects, things to do. I imagine now that this was how he was trying to hold me.
The word bonsai literally translates as “planted in a container.” The trees are no different than those rooted to the earth. Somewhere I read that the art of bonsai is “the experience of a tree that has become detached from its ground and now lives in a pot.” They need daily attention to survive. They need to be met with deep intuition about their unique natures in order to fully grow into themselves.
And isn’t marriage a little like that? Mindful of the aesthetic, we choose the container that holds us best: four walls or rounded? Terracotta or deadwood? Rocky terrain or mossy forest floor? We prune our roots to better fit each other’s lives, to meet the seasons. Sometimes we flower; we bear fruit.
What if when we try to make love last, our commitment doesn’t diminish us by rendering us less than we are but rather reduces us, as in, contains and holds us tight when we are falling apart? What if it reduces us, as in, mitigates what pains us and lightens us up? What if this is how we more fully grow into ourselves?
Some bonsai live for hundreds of years and are passed down through generations, often within the same family. Elder gardeners model the patience, the tenderness, the responsiveness required to create a space that allows the tree to grow into its full and unique glory, so that those who inherit the trees have had good guidance.
With you, I am acutely aware of myself becoming. Matt’s vows were so beautiful, so poetic. Grampa didn’t hear them, though his marriage to Matt’s grandmother, Susie, was perhaps our best example of one that had lovingly, often happily, endured.
Planted in their container: Grampa and Susie raised four daughters, lost one
of those daughters, grew old and died in their modest home in Springfield,
New Jersey—far from the reaches of Hitler—where they built
an addition onto the house to make
space for a dining table big enough
to seat the whole family
for Passover.
Over all of those years, they reached toward each other with everything that ached; they grew bark.
“Mon,” Matt said. “Mon, I feel bad. I love you. I never meant to be short with you.” I felt ridiculous. In the fireplace, the flames had burned off, leaving the tender log glowing between us. “I was actually…I have been writing all of my texts to you in haiku.”
I shook my head. “You what?”
“Haiku. I figured you would catch on, but you never did, so I just kept going.”
“Wait. For how long? How long have you been doing that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe two years?”
I scrolled back through our texts, months-worth, predominated by lists and requests and arguments we couldn’t let spill out in front of the kids in our tiny apartment. The tired, transactional texts between us and read them again, differently now:
Pick up the laundry.
Swing by grocery store for stamps,
fire logs and apples.
Did you remember
to pay gas and electric?
Take out recycling?
Please wake with the kids!
Up too late. Stomach aching.
Need to get some sleep.
“I didn’t do it the night your father died,” he said. I read that message again, the one he sent after I’d hung up the phone in the back bedroom but couldn’t yet return to the living, my husband and children waiting for me around the dining table, ready to encircle me. In that text, he had broken form, his sympathy spilling over into long reassurances. But the daily verses, too, the nature of which I hadn’t clearly understood before, were reassuring. Each was a frank reflection of our lives now—together in the thick of heartache and stomachache and our children’s incessant needs—the essential, simple, ragged beauty of our devotion to each other inside of our container:
I’ll keep showing up.
I want to be here with you.
We are together.
At the exhibit, I learned that bonsai are planted just off center, leaving a space where heaven and earth can meet. This allows the tree to take on a more natural form: swept off-kilter and bending against the wind.
About the author
Monica Judge’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Southern Humanities Review, New Delta Review, Off Assignment, River Teeth Beautiful Things, and elsewhere. Her flash fiction was a finalist for the 2020 Stories Out of School contest held in partnership with The Academy for Teachers and A Public Space. She is a high school English teacher and lives in Maryland with her husband and two children.
“Bonsai” was originally published in the New Delta Review. Many thanks for their permission to reprint it here.
On top of that, New Delta Review nominated “Bonsai” for the Best of the Net anthology! Congratulations, Monica!
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